Group Fitness Instrutor Certification – is it worth it?
Hi everyone, I’m considering becoming a Group Fitness Instructor and have been researching which governing body to take the test through (ACE, ACSM). I am interested in starting a career that’s healthy, flexible and allows me to schedule around my family. In considering this, I have also researched salary/hourly rates. It looks like the average hourly rate is $25.00/hour. So, according to my calculations, if I was interested in making $30,000/year, I would have to teach 3.5 classes per day. Calculations:
$30,000/year
$2,500/month
$625/week
$625/$25 per class = 25 classes per week
25 classes per week = 3.5 classes per day
So my questions are this:
1. Is a Group Instructor paid per class/session?
2. Assuming the class is one hour, are instructors only paid for the actual hour teaching or is there time in front or back of the actual class hour for things like set up, clean up etc? If so, how many hours should I be calclating to be paid on per class? 1.5? 2?
3. My initial thought is 3.5 classes per day seems like a lot – or is it?
4. What is the definition of “group” – would training a class of five people justify a group or am I wandering off into the personal training side?
At this point, I’m wondering if getting the certification is even worth it. Would appreciate any and all thoughts and bits of advice. Thanks much!
All the above answers are correct. I have been teaching for 30 + years but I was a stay at home mom & exercise was a passion, so why not get paid for it. At my facility which I own, most instructors are teaching because its their passion. Teaching the amount of classes you want to teach will only lead to burnout & injury. You will be running from gym to gym spending a lot of your time travel & gas & you will eventually hate it. Unless you can come up with a better plan for income I would stick to not more then six classes per week, depending on your age of course. You can get away with coaching classes & not actually participating in them, just demo form etc. & that way you can pay more attention to your participants. Good luck!
I have taught up to 30 classes a week. It was grueling initially because I was pretty much doing each class along with the clients. But I saw right away that I would not be able to keep that up forever. One of the things that I learned to do is fake intensity and pace myself throughout the classes. Many times I did almost no actual exercise in some classes. I would cue, demo, and then move about the class giving individual attention. At one point I had four or five really good students in the class and would put two of them up front with me having one demo high intensity and one demo low intensity. I gave them free classes and they learned a lot about teaching and became instructor themselves.
I don’t teach like that many classes a week anymore, but I still use many of the things that I learned back then, now.
